7 Tested Strategies of Pitching New Business to Clients (and Winning)

The way you pitch can determine the outcome right away.

I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs treat their business prospects like a leaky bucket. They waste a lot of time pouring more water into the bucket (traffic and leads) instead of fixing the leaks in the bucket (their marketing funnel).

This is the perfect recipe for above-average acquisition costs and a below-average number of proposals. If you pitch your business more effectively to a client, you can convert 50% more leads to proposals and turn them into confirmed contracts.

On a regular basis, I still receive messages like this:

Hi Avijit,

I know you probably receive a lot of messages about SEO services but we’re different from the rest and I am willing to prove it. Here are a few reasons we’re not your normal SEO agency –

Our SEO and marketing services are designed for success.

We’re in it for the long term! We are an extremely low-turnover business and our costs go up significantly if we lose clients in the first year. So we have a large incentive to keep you happy and keep you on board for the long term.

If you’re interested in hearing what we can do for your site then I would love to set up a consultation call with you. Let me know what time/day works best (and the best number).

Yawn.

This pitch has all the mistakes that you should refrain from making – it makes stupid claims, it is ambiguous, and it talks about features but not what they can do for me (the prospect). It’s also pretty boring. Focus on getting the pitch right, and half the job is done.

Here are a few strategies to make your pitch better.

Don’t Go in Cold

Gary Vaynerchuk says this relentlessly: we live in a world where we’re only a tweet away from the people we want to connect with.

It’s about going the extra mile and connecting with the potential client first. It’s actually pretty simple. Go to their feed and check out their last 5-10 posts or tweets. Then, initiate a conversation with them. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about your business. Just try to develop a personal connection with them.

People value passion and emotion. You might be the smartest and savviest person in the world, but if you don’t come across as passionate, chances are you won’t convert the lead.

Write a Solid Introduction

The introduction is where you grab your lead’s attention and get them to listen to you. This is your chance to put your foot in the door. I can’t stress enough the importance of names in email pitches. Even if it takes a lot of hustle, try to make the emails more personal, even if you’re pitching to a company.

For example, search the company page on LinkedIn, and you may find the people associated with it on the right-hand side of the screen in the “People also Viewed” section. Then get straight to the point. No one is interested in your life story; the prospect should know exactly why you’re getting in touch.

Open-Ended Questions

If you have a digital marketing agency, your pitch can look something like this:

Hi __,

My name is ___ – we have spoken a couple of times on Twitter – apart from being a Real Madrid fan, I manage a content writing agency. I wanted to ask: how well is your company performing on Google?

I took the liberty of performing an audit of your site – just to check if you even needed any SEO work – and I got some results that you should be aware of.

The question asked in this pitch doesn’t require a Yes or No answer, it gets someone to THINK about the response. This gets the person to be more attentive, and think about your proposal. You can also change the question to – “How do you feel about your current SEO services?”

Turn Features into Benefits

This is where you start focusing more on the client and less on yourself. Rather than your features, potential clients care about what those features can do for THEM. You don’t care about how much caffeine is in your coffee – you care about how alert it makes you feel.

Continuing the previous sample pitch, here’s how you can go about it:

For example, if you were to optimize your site for mobile devices, it would be easier to find for both potential customers and new employees (especially helpful now that you’re hiring). We’ve also seen a few areas where you can outrank your competition, that would drive new customers your way.

What’s Your Reason for Pitching?

There is no use adding more water when it is going to leak. It’s a big waste of everyone’s time if you pitch services that clients don’t need. When you do that research, you’ll also be able to be more personalized in your pitch. Going ahead and attaching a PDF of how you can help will be even better.

Find the Competitors

Finding the potential client’s competitors will help you put yourself in a position of leverage and knowledge. Find out who they’re competing with – you’ll be able to spot a few of their mistakes, too. It will give you room to capitalize and be more competitive by improving on those lags. Your prospect will pounce on the opportunity and accept your service to overtake the client.

What’s more, if this pitch doesn’t fall through, you might have other potential clients in them!

Sign off Confidently

You might be thinking that you won’t get a reply, but don’t let that show in the way you sign off. Conclude the pitch thinking you’re going to hear from them no matter what. Here’s a sample:

If you’ve got any questions don’t be afraid to ask!

Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.

Pitch Perfect

Over to you now! It’s time to test these strategies and make them your own. I hope to see better messages from you (and others)in my inbox now by implementing some of these strategies!Opinions expressed here are the opinions of the author. Influencive does not endorse or review brands mentioned; does not and can not investigate relationships with brands, products, and people mentioned and is up to the author to disclose. VIP Contributors and Contributors, amongst other accounts and articles, are professional fee-based.

Avi Arya , a street car racer discovered the internet in 1995 and grew his family’s small hotel into a thriving boutique hotel business.

Ranked the Top 100 Digital Icons by Impact , He founded Internet Moguls , a social + digital agency in 2009 and grew it from 4 to 155 people in 4 countries.

After 82 awards for his work , Avi And Internet Moguls help individual entrepreneurs and businesses like the Mariott Starwood Hotels & Thai Airways and over 600 + small and large Sonia neha world wide.

He conducts social media workshops online and offline to help business and and in the last two years over 8500 + students have taken his social media success courses.